Thirty-nine millimeters, 54 millimeters, 108 millimeters, and 114 millimeters are the lengths of the ammunition cartridges and 5.45 millimeters, 7.62 millimeters, 12.7 millimeters, and 14.5 millimeters the diameters of the bores of small-caliber gun barrels manufactured in those countries that signed the Warsaw Pact. Nineteen millimeters (hereafter mm), 45 mm, and 99 mm, and 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, 9.0 mm, and 12.7 mm are the respective measurements of the same objects when they are manufactured in countries belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. For artillery and other large-caliber weapons, the relevant calibers are 100 mm, 122 mm, and 152 mm, or 105 mm and 155 mm, respectively.
As a result of these differences, the size of a cartridge, the shape of a bullet, or the diameter of a gun barrel’s bore has come to indicate not only a weapon’s country of manufacture but also the things the people in those countries believe, or used to believe, in the same way that scientists once thought that the shape of a person’s skull could predict their intelligence and personality.
After NATO was formed to stop the expansion of the Soviet Union, and to convince Europeans that capitalism was preferable to either communism or fascism, the leaders of the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Warsaw in 1955 with other, smaller countries in the so-called “Eastern Bloc” such as Albania, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic, and these countries agreed to defend each other if attacked by the imperialist West. The pact was called the “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance” and although the Soviet Union had a year earlier tried unsuccessfully to join NATO, its leaders were also worried about the NATO member nation of West Germany, which they believed was full of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers and which was now rearmed and even protected by nuclear weapons through its mutual defense agreement with the United States.
Instead of joining NATO, the Soviet Union made their own treaty, and later on decided to build a wall to separate East from West Berlin, and to fortify borders between the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East. And at a secret meeting in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev said that “I believe there are people in our countries who might argue: was it worth a cost to push this issue and let the heat and international tension rise... We have to explain to them that we have to wring this peace treaty, there is no other way... .” And at the same time he told Walter Ulbricht, who wanted not only to isolate but to recapture West Berlin, “not a millimeter further.” But then the members of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia (except Albania and Romania, who refused), and later on the Soviet Union collapsed.
Before and after these events, some countries who were part of the pact manufactured weapons and ammunition, and set parameters for the size and weight of firearms and bullets, and long after the countries of the pact were no longer socialist or even, in some cases, in existence, ”Warsaw Pact caliber” weapons continued to be produced in China, Russia and some countries in Europe, even in countries like Hungary or Romania that now belong to NATO. And when, between 2014 and 2017, researchers visited Iraq and Syria to find out where the weapons the Islamic State was using came from, they found that nearly all of them were Warsaw Pact caliber, and almost none came from NATO-caliber countries such as the United States except a few which were captured from Iraqi forces in 2014.
Most of the weapons the researchers found were AK-style assault rifles, where the AK stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova. Ninety-seven percent of these rifles were Warsaw Pact caliber and 3 percent were NATO caliber. But when they took videos and photographs for propaganda purposes, ISIS leaders preferred to show fighters holding NATO-caliber and in particular U.S.-made weapons, since this suggested ISIS had captured many such weapons in their assault on Mosul, which fact they hoped would demoralize and confuse Americans and their allies. And the best find of all were rifles chambered for 5.56 × 45 mm NATO-caliber ammunition, and because such weapons were prized by fighters on all sides it’s possible the researchers couldn’t find as many and they were undercounted as a result.
It was still the case that more than half of the weapons and ammunition used by ISIS in Iraq and Syria were made in Russia or China. A majority came from China, but in Syria more weapons came from Russia than from China, since Russia had supplied weapons to the Syrian regime to suppress the country’s Arab Spring-inspired rebels, and some of these weapons were taken by ISIS fighters after victories in battle. Not many weapons came directly from the United States although the U.S. is the largest arms exporter in the world, larger than the next six largest exporters put together. And a lot of ISIS weapons were manufactured in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Germany, and more were manufactured in the Czech Republic than were manufactured in the United States, and more were manufactured in the United Staes than were manufactured in Iran, and not very many but some were manufactured in the United Kingdom, Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt, Italy, and Spain.
At first glance, it looked like Eastern Europe and long-dead or still-living Communist regimes like the Soviet Union and China were more to blame for arming ISIS than NATO countries where weapons are manufactured under the banner of freedom and capitalism. But on closer inspection it turned out that most of those weapons and ammunition manufactured in Europe, which comprised one-fifth of all the ISIS weapons and ammunition the researchers found, were brought to the Middle East not by European countries themselves but by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Both countries were arming Arab Spring-inspired rebels against the Assad government using weapons and ammunition from Europe, even though this “unauthorized transfer” was not permitted under their purchase agreements, and when ISIS recruited, captured, or killed these other rebels, they took the weapons for themselves as spoils of war. Sometimes the transfer took place very quickly, as when an advanced anti-tank guided weapon, manufactured at a factory inside the EU, was sold to the United States, delivered to Syrian opposition forces, and acquired by the Islamic State within a two-month period.
In many cases, the researchers observed, someone had tried to disguise where the weapons and ammunition came from, either by repacking bullets and throwing away the original boxes or by painting over or scratching out factory markings engraved into the weapons themselves. No one wanted to be known to be supplying weapons to any fighters in Iraq and Syria, even though there was no arms embargo on either country during the researchers’ fieldwork. And, of course, ISIS fighters also famously made improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which as their name suggests require no weapons manufacturers at all, only ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate, aluminium paste, and sorbitol for the explosive chemicals, plus detonators, containers, and detonating cords filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, all of which could be bought easily in Turkey, and later brought over the mountains into Iraq and Syria.
And later on, the United States, the European Union, and other countries imposed sanctions on Syria, which sanctions included the areas controlled by the government as well as those areas controlled by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria whose soldiers were largely responsible for defeating the ISIS state, and when I visited the latter areas a journalist told me that all of their weapons and ammunition, as well as the weapons of their enemies, had to be purchased on the black market.
And in Ukraine, in 2021, researchers found that most recovered weapons from the separatist regions in the east were 5.45 × 39 mm Warsaw Pact-caliber assault rifles, manufactured in the Russian Federation. Then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine again and weapons from all over the world and of all calibers made their way to the country, where they blew up buildings and bridges and tore into clothing and flesh, and many NATO countries promised weapons to Ukraine and so did countries that once belonged to the Warsaw Pact, and therefore a soldier or civilian in Ukraine on either side might never know whether the round that killed him was fired from a barrel with a diameter of 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, 9.0 mm, 12.7 mm, or 14.5 mm. And if your home was blown up by a howitzer or other long-range artillery, its caliber might be 100 mm, 105 mm, 122 mm, 152 mm, or 155 mm.
And in the United States in peacetime it was possible for an 18-year-old teenager, the son of two civil engineers, to legally purchase a U.S.-made assault rifle with 5.56 × 45 mm NATO-caliber ammunition — the same measurements favored by all actors in Iraq and Syria — and drive to a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, to murder ten Black people because he believed whites in America were being replaced by non-whites, and that this was a genocide. And it was also possible for an 18-year-old teenager in Texas to purchase two AR-15 style assault rifles, including one U.S.-made “Daniel Defense” rifle, whose web site advertises five to seven business day processing times for all orders and enjoins customers to “Join our mailing list to receive your 10% off coupon, plus be ‘in the know’ with exclusive offers, product announcements, news, contests and so much more!” and then to purchase 375 rounds of 5.56 mm NATO-caliber ammunition in order to attack a classroom of elementary school students for unclear reasons, ten days after the shooting in Buffalo, killing 19 children and two adults.
And caliber continues to refer both to a person’s degree of mental acuity or a quantity of moral fiber as well as to the bore of a gun barrel, specified to hundredths or thousandths of an inch, which is also the degree of specificity required for a pacemaker or stent when inserted into a human body.
Sources
Source for most information on ISIS weaponry, unless otherwise noted, is the Conflict Armament Research report “Weapons of the Islamic State”. https://www.conflictarm.com/reports/weapons-of-the-islamic-state/
Source for large caliber/artillery calibers: https://www.roec.biz/project/the-known-unknowns-of-romanias-defense-modernization-plans/
Source for Ukraine weapons is the Conflict Armament Research report found here: https://ukraine-2021-itrace.hub.arcgis.com
Sometimes there are two measurements of caliber, one for the distance between the grooves (the cut out portions of the rifling in the barrel), and another for the lands (the raised portion of the rifling), and sometimes weapons manufacturers refer in marketing materials to a caliber by an incorrect measurement because it is a rounder number (for example calling the Winchester .308 a .30 caliber cartridge). Source: https://backfire.tv/caliber-mm-conversion-chart/
Photo (my own): Oil derricks in the Al-Hasakah governorate in Rojava (Syria), currently under the control of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.